NHH Norwegian School of Economics
Recent publications
Empirical studies have often established a negative relationship between the size of a firm where an individual is employed and the probability of that individual subsequently founding a business. This literature suggests that size captures work organization—particularly bureaucracy—and that bureaucracy affects the transition to entrepreneurship. However, many studies find that firm size is a poor proxy of work organization and, therefore, calls for empirical research exploring the link between specific measures of work organization and the transition to entrepreneurship. We create a measure of work organization from survey data—ranging from bureaucracy to adhocracy. We then combine this with longitudinal matched employer–employee register data and investigate different types of entrepreneurial transitions for individuals triggered by a mass worker displacement event. We find that work organization significantly affects several measures of transition, with possible implications for the policies and institutional settings that condition firms’ organization of work.
Dishonest behaviours such as tax evasion impose significant societal costs. Ex ante honesty oaths—commitments to honesty before action—have been proposed as interventions to counteract dishonest behaviour, but the heterogeneity in findings across operationalizations calls their effectiveness into question. We tested 21 honesty oaths (including a baseline oath)—proposed, evaluated and selected by 44 expert researchers—and a no-oath condition in a megastudy involving 21,506 UK and US participants from Prolific.com who played an incentivized tax evasion game online. Of the 21 interventions, 10 significantly improved tax compliance by 4.5 to 8.5 percentage points, with the most successful nearly halving tax evasion. Limited evidence for moderators was found. Experts and laypeople failed to predict the most effective interventions, though experts’ predictions were more accurate. In conclusion, honesty oaths were effective in curbing dishonesty, but their effectiveness varied depending on content. These findings can help design impactful interventions to curb dishonesty.
After the expansion of the FIFA World Cup from 32 to 48 teams starting in the 2026 edition, the initial proposal was to split the 48 national teams into 16 groups of three. Among other drawbacks, this proposal provides potential for collusion. Recently, after widespread criticism, FIFA officials decided to revisit that proposal, instead approving a tournament with 12 groups of four teams. However, the approved format does not eliminate the possibility of collusion. In this chapter, we propose tournament formats for a World Cup with 12 groups of four teams, considering several criteria, such as non-collusion, symmetry in rest days, and no dead rubbers. At the same time, our proposals attempt to adhere to the traditional format, with some nuances in either the group or elimination stage.
Scholars warn that partisan divisions in the mass public threaten the health of American democracy. We conducted a megastudy ( n = 32,059 participants) testing 25 treatments designed by academics and practitioners to reduce Americans’ partisan animosity and antidemocratic attitudes. We find that many treatments reduced partisan animosity, most strongly by highlighting relatable sympathetic individuals with different political beliefs or by emphasizing common identities shared by rival partisans. We also identify several treatments that reduced support for undemocratic practices—most strongly by correcting misperceptions of rival partisans’ views or highlighting the threat of democratic collapse—which shows that antidemocratic attitudes are not intractable. Taken together, the study’s findings identify promising general strategies for reducing partisan division and improving democratic attitudes, shedding theoretical light on challenges facing American democracy.
Fiscal rules have proliferated as a way to limit public debt. Rules aim to impose fiscal discipline on governments that might be otherwise present-biased. However, lenders also discipline government borrowing through a market mechanism, with excessive debt penalized with higher interest rates. In this paper, we study the interaction between fiscal rules and market discipline in limiting government borrowing. We do so in a sovereign borrowing model with asymmetric information about governments’ propensity to over-borrow and default. Governments may signal their fiscal rectitude by showing fiscal restraint and this can lead not only to over-borrowing as in traditional models, but also to under-borrowing, as governments attempt to signal their fiscal responsibility. In addition to their traditional role of restraining present-biased governments, fiscal rules also make signalling more difficult and may have the perverse effect of forcing prudent governments to save even more excessively than otherwise, or alternatively hamper their ability to signal their rectitude entirely. Fiscal rules restrain impatient governments but penalize prudent governments. An optimal fiscal rule balances these trade-offs and will be binding at times, but will never be so tight as to naïvely push governments to “do the right thing”.
Professors Robert A. Baron and Michael Frese are the joint recipients of the 2024 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research. Their research contributions have helped establish the disciplinary foundation necessary to explore entrepreneurship from theoretical and applied psychological perspectives. From a theoretical psychological perspective, Professor Baron has repeatedly introduced a disciplinary scaffolding from cognitive psychology, social psychology, and judgment and decision-making psychology to develop the field’s socio-cognitive perspective. He has examined entrepreneurship’s basic “why” questions: (1) Why do some persons but not others choose to become entrepreneurs? (2) Why do some persons but not others recognize opportunities for new products or services that can be profitably exploited? (3) Why are some entrepreneurs so much more successful than others? From an applied psychological perspective, Professor Frese has examined entrepreneurship as the epitome of a proactive approach to work, advocating the benefits of personal initiative and the need for a self-regulatory approach to performance among both small business owners and employees in transition economies. Continually taking stock of what is known about the psychology of entrepreneurship through reviews and meta-analysis, he and his students have advanced an evidence-based approach to entrepreneurial training and performance in challenging contexts. Together, Professors Baron and Frese have served as ambassadors for the field of entrepreneurship, welcoming an entire generation of micro scholars to explore the entrepreneurial process and the psychology of the entrepreneurs who enact it.
Climate change is currently one of humanity’s greatest threats. To help scholars understand the psychology of climate change, we conducted an online quasi-experimental survey on 59,508 participants from 63 countries (collected between July 2022 and July 2023). In a between-subjects design, we tested 11 interventions designed to promote climate change mitigation across four outcomes: climate change belief, support for climate policies, willingness to share information on social media, and performance on an effortful pro-environmental behavioural task. Participants also reported their demographic information (e.g., age, gender) and several other independent variables (e.g., political orientation, perceptions about the scientific consensus). In the no-intervention control group, we also measured important additional variables, such as environmentalist identity and trust in climate science. We report the collaboration procedure, study design, raw and cleaned data, all survey materials, relevant analysis scripts, and data visualisations. This dataset can be used to further the understanding of psychological, demographic, and national-level factors related to individual-level climate action and how these differ across countries.
This study explores the manifestation of meeting leadership styles through humour and laughter in Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meetings, focusing on differences across the tenures of Chairs Greenspan, Bernanke and Yellen. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of meeting transcripts from 1987 to 2017 highlight the role of humour. The study explores various functions of laughter and finds that laughter frequency and initiation of laughter differ among the chairs, reflecting their distinct leadership styles. The findings suggest that a more facilitative leadership style is marked by higher frequencies of laughter tokens. This research contributes to understanding the dynamics of meeting leadership and the strategic use of humour in professional settings.
It is often argued that inequality may worsen coordination failures as it exacerbates conflicts of interests, making it difficult to achieve an efficient outcome. This paper shows that this needs not to be always the case. In a context in which two interacting populations have conflicting interests, we introduce ex-ante inequality, by making one population stronger than the other. This reduces the cost of miscoordination for the weakest population, and at the same time it makes some equilibria more equitable than others, thus more focal and attractive for inequality-averse players. Hence, both social preferences and strategic risk considerations may ease coordination. We provide experimental support for this hypothesis, by considering an extended two-population Hawk–Dove game, where ex-ante inequality, number of pure-strategy equilibria, and cost of coordination vary across treatments. We find that subjects coordinate more often on the efficient outcomes in the treatment with ex-ante inequality.
In this study, we examine auditors' reliance on artificial intelligence (AI) systems that are designed to provide evidence around complex estimates. In an experiment with highly experienced auditors, we find that auditors are more hesitant to rely on evidence from AI‐based systems compared to human specialists, consistent with algorithm aversion. Importantly, we also find that a small amount of control (i.e., providing input to specialists) can mitigate this aversion, though this effect depends on auditors' personal locus of control (LOC). Providing input increases reliance on evidence from AI systems for auditors who believe they have little control over their outcomes (i.e., an external LOC). In contrast, auditors with an internal LOC are particularly hesitant to rely on AI‐based evidence, and providing input has little impact on their reliance. Interviews with experienced auditors corroborate our findings and suggest auditors feel a greater sense of control working with human specialists relative to AI‐based systems. Overall, our results suggest perceived control plays an important role in auditors' aversion to AI and that auditors' individual traits can affect this aversion.
Creating opportunities for people to achieve socioeconomic mobility is a widely shared societal goal. Paradoxically, however, achieving this goal can pose a threat to high-socioeconomic-status (SES) people as they look to maintain their privileged positions in society for both them and their children. Two studies evaluate whether this threat manifests as “opportunity hoarding” in which high-SES parents adopt attitudes and behaviors aimed at shoring up their families’ access to valuable educational and economic resources. The current paper provides converging evidence for this hypothesis across two studies conducted with 2,557 American parents. An initial correlational study demonstrated that believing that socioeconomic mobility is possible was associated with high-SES parents being more inclined to attempt to secure valuable educational and economic resources for their children, even when doing so came at the cost of low-SES families. Specifically, high-SES parents with stronger beliefs in socioeconomic mobility exhibited decreased support for redistributive policies and viewed engaging in discrete behaviors that would unfairly advantage their children (e.g., allowing them to misrepresent their identities on school and job applications) as more acceptable relative to both low-SES parents with similar beliefs and high-SES parents who were less optimistic about socioeconomic mobility. A subsequent experimental study established these relationships causally by comparing parents’ responses to different types of socioeconomic mobility. Together, the current findings merge insights across psychology and economics to deepen understandings of the processes through which societal inequities emerge and persist, especially during times of apparently abundant opportunity.
How can crisis leadership be developed before an organisational crisis occurs? This article addresses this important question by reviewing three individual‐level leadership perspectives (leader personality traits, leadership styles, and functional leadership) and three organisational level perspectives (leadership as contextual, leadership as collective, and leadership as dynamic), on how to develop crisis leadership with regard to recruitment, selection, and training. While crisis leadership is often perceived as something individual “leaders are born with” or as a variant of general leadership abilities, such an understanding leaves much to chance in terms of who will be effective leaders in a crisis, as well as the development of leadership capacity in organisations before a crisis actually occurs. This passive approach not only contradicts research on what constitutes effective crisis leadership but also is perceived to be unethical in terms of the potential consequences ineffective leadership can have in a crisis. This article provides an integrative overview of current and hitherto dispersed crisis leadership development research, showing how recruitment, selection and training to achieve collective crisis leadership capacity encompasses switching between organisational and individual level perspectives. We suggest implications for theory and future research as well as for practitioners responsible for developing crisis leadership in organisations.
Earlier studies of individuals’ law-abiding behavior find significant effects of home country corruption level on compliance. In our study of manager’s tax compliance, we use data from random audits and find associations between tax compliance and the use of an external accountant, age, manager’s place of origin and employees’ conflict exposure, but no effect from a manager’s own conflict exposure, nor Corruption Perception Index scores. The use of an external accountant seems to commit managers to comply with reporting requirements. Our findings suggest that factors such as managers’ age and company characteristics are important in understanding manager compliance. To study whether other mechanisms not previously tested may provide explanatory power, we specify two machinelearning models, which confirm our findings, but also suggest other associations. Nontechnical summary Our study examines tax compliance among managers using data from random audits. We found associations between tax compliance and the use of an external accountant, age, manager’s place of origin and employees’ conflict exposure. However, the manager’s own conflict exposure and corruption levels in their home country did not affect compliance. External accountants seem to encourage managers to comply with tax rules. Machine-learning models confirmed these findings and suggested other relevant factors.
Consumers can sometimes be exploited because they make mistakes in their valuation of products. We present the results from a large-scale experimental study that examines whether third-party spectators from the general population in the United States cancel a voluntary deal where a buyer has made a mistake in the valuation of a product and agreed to pay more for the product than the seller knows it is worth. We find that the majority of the spectators cancel such deals, even when the seller’s involvement is limited to accepting a proposal made by the buyer. A substantial share of these spectators is also willing to fine the seller. However, a large minority of the spectators are willing to uphold the deal even when the seller has proposed the deal and obfuscated the information provided to the buyer. Our results shed new light on when people view market transactions as acceptable and their attitudes to government regulation of businesses. This paper was accepted by Axel Ockenfels, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Funding: This project was financed with support from the Norges Forskningsråd [Centres of Excellence Scheme Centre for Experimental Research on Fairness, Inequality and Rationality Project 262675 Grants 236995, 250415, 262636, and 302145]. The project also received funding from the European Research Council [the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme Grant 788433]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.01050 .
Nitrate pollution from agricultural production is a major threat to water resources worldwide. This study quantifies the consequences of groundwater nitrate pollution for the drinking water supply sector by estimating the effect of groundwater nitrate pollution on the costs of water utilities. In doing so, we contribute to the estimation of the external costs of agricultural nonpoint pollution associated with drinking water supply. Empirical evidence is based on fixed effects regressions using large panel data sets on water supply companies and groundwater sampling sites in Germany. Local nitrate pollution at the abstraction plant is approximated using spatial interpolation. Our findings reveal that water suppliers incur substantial costs through groundwater nitrate pollution in terms of increased treatment and total costs. The estimated cost elasticities range from 0.048 to 0.052 for treatment costs and up to 0.019 for total costs. For an average firm, these estimates imply annual increases in treatment and total costs of €39,000 and €116,000, respectively, for a 10 milligrams per liter increase in groundwater nitrate concentrations.
The social and behavioral sciences have been increasingly using automated text analysis to measure psychological constructs in text. We explore whether GPT, the large-language model (LLM) underlying the AI chatbot ChatGPT, can be used as a tool for automated psychological text analysis in several languages. Across 15 datasets ( n = 47,925 manually annotated tweets and news headlines), we tested whether different versions of GPT (3.5 Turbo, 4, and 4 Turbo) can accurately detect psychological constructs (sentiment, discrete emotions, offensiveness, and moral foundations) across 12 languages. We found that GPT ( r = 0.59 to 0.77) performed much better than English-language dictionary analysis ( r = 0.20 to 0.30) at detecting psychological constructs as judged by manual annotators. GPT performed nearly as well as, and sometimes better than, several top-performing fine-tuned machine learning models. Moreover, GPT’s performance improved across successive versions of the model, particularly for lesser-spoken languages, and became less expensive. Overall, GPT may be superior to many existing methods of automated text analysis, since it achieves relatively high accuracy across many languages, requires no training data, and is easy to use with simple prompts (e.g., “is this text negative?”) and little coding experience. We provide sample code and a video tutorial for analyzing text with the GPT application programming interface. We argue that GPT and other LLMs help democratize automated text analysis by making advanced natural language processing capabilities more accessible, and may help facilitate more cross-linguistic research with understudied languages.
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1,893 members
Guttorm Schjelderup
  • Department of Business and Management Science
Hans Jarle Kind
  • Department of Economics
Jarle Møen
  • Department of Business and Management Science
Tor Wallin Andreassen
  • Department of Strategy and Management
Jon Iden
  • Department of Strategy and Management
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Øystein Thøgersen